Film Critic

Owen Gleiberman, a film critic for Entertainment Weekly for more than two decades, was laid off from the magazine along with six other staff members on Wednesday, according to Poynter. The others are senior writer Josh Rottenberg, staff writer Annie Barrett, music critic Nick Catucci, senior editor Kerrie Mitchell, deputy design director David Schlow and product director Chad Schlegel, Poynter said . Gleiberman was one of EW's best-known and most widely read bylines, having written at the magazine since its launch in 1990.

Movie buffs and motorcycle fans can conjure memories of a 1991 Hollywood blockbuster -- starring California's former governor -- at a new exhibition at a Milwaukee museum. “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” is the name of both the film and the display that opens Thursday at the Harley-Davidson Museum . At its core is a time-worn Fat Boy Harley ridden throughout the movie by actor and later California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The film also starred Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in the story about a cyborg (Schwarzenegger)

Stanley Kauffmann, the longtime film and theater critic of The New Republic who in the 20th century helped define movie reviews as an intellectual form, has died. He was 97. Kauffmann died from complications of pneumonia in New York. A tribute will be held honoring his work but there will be no funeral, per his request, a New Republic spokesman said Wednesday. Over his 54 years at the magazine, Kauffmann assessed innumerable cinematic masterpieces and helped bring a number of seminal directors to light, particularly the New Hollywood filmmakers of the 1970s and European upstart auteurs such as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

If you haven't made it to "Bad Words," Jason Bateman's directing debut and sarcastic takedown of the spelling bee game, it's just become much easier to indulge in this guilty pleasure. Like Bateman's 40-year-old Guy with a grudge and unbeatable spelling chops, the movie is turning up everywhere now. The competitive spelling world, teeming with bright kids, obsessive parents and rigid educators, proves to be rich terrain for a caustic, clever comedy. The actor-director puts himself in good funny company too - Kathryn Hahn and Allison Janney among others.

Fans of Roger Ebert expressed shock Thursday afternoon after the film critic passed away just days after announcing he was seeking treatment for a recurrence of cancer. "Roger, I hope you're in an infinite movie palace, watching every film the great directors only dreamed of making," wrote comedian Patton Oswalt on Twitter moments after news of the 70-year-old's death broke. "By the way, Death's about to get a SUPER [crappy] review. " On his website Tuesday evening, Ebert said he was receiving radiation therapy to treat a hip fracture that had turned out to be cancerous.

We live in an age of artistic appropriation. Recording artists freely "sample" music created by other people, visual artists stretch the concept of "fair use" to create art from photographs they did not take, and a young novelist in Germany was unconcerned when pages of someone else's writing were found in her own novel. "There is no such thing as originality," she said, "just authenticity. " By those standards, what the British theater group Kneehigh has done to David Lean's classic romantic melodrama "Brief Encounter" is mild indeed.

"Gravity," the Sandra Bullock-George Clooney astronauts-in-distress movie, rocketed to the No. 1 spot at the box office over the weekend. Did you find the movie realistic? Was the 3-D up to your expectations? And do you think it can win some Oscars? Join us for a live chat about the movie at noon Pacific time Tuesday with Times film critic Kenneth Turan and Hollywood awards guru Glenn Whipp. You can also tweet your questions to us using the hashtag #gravityLAT and sign up for a reminder below.

Film critic Roger Ebert died at age 70 after a long battle with cancer of the thyroid and salivary glands. Best known for his witty movie reviews, Ebert was also a food enthusiast who, among the more than a dozen books he wrote, penned "The Pot and How to Use It: The Mystery and Romance of the Rice Cooker. " The book was published in 2010, four years after surgery that damaged his carotid artery left him with a hole in his throat and unable to eat, drink or speak. He was fed liquid paste through a tube in his stomach, but undeterred (the quality for which he was so widely admired)

Judith Crist, who blazed a trail as the first full-time female film critic at a major U.S. newspaper and went on to become widely known to cinema lovers through her movie reviews in TV Guide magazine and on the "Today" show, died Tuesday at age 90. Crist cared deeply about her readers and criticism in general, which lead her to teach at Columbia University's graduate school of journalism until just several months ago. Like any critic worth remembering,...

A week after "12 Years a Slave" director Steve McQueen reportedly was ridiculed as an "embarrassing doorman" at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, critic Armond White has been shown the door himself. The critics group voted Monday morning to expel White from its ranks, member Owen Gleiberman confirmed in an online post. White, the editor and movie critic of City Arts, has denied reports that he heckled McQueen while the British filmmaker was accepting a directing award last week, but Gleiberman wrote : " I was sitting about 40 feet away from him, and though I couldn't make out everything that was said, I can testify: Everyone at my table lurched around to see where the loud, jeering, disruptive comments were coming from.

Owen Gleiberman, a film critic for Entertainment Weekly for more than two decades, was laid off from the magazine along with six other staff members on Wednesday, according to Poynter. The others are senior writer Josh Rottenberg, staff writer Annie Barrett, music critic Nick Catucci, senior editor Kerrie Mitchell, deputy design director David Schlow and product director Chad Schlegel, Poynter said . Gleiberman was one of EW's best-known and most widely read bylines, having written at the magazine since its launch in 1990.

New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane is catching heat for his recent profile of Scarlett Johansson , which detractors say fawns over the actress without bothering to comprehend her. Johansson has two films coming out on the same day (April 4): "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" and "Under the Skin," and has recently been linked to separate controversies involving SodaStream and Woody Allen. As critics of Lane's profile point out, he devotes much of it to cataloging Johansson 's allure, describing "the honey of her voice" and declaring that she "looks tellingly radiant in the flesh" or seems to be " made from champagne.

We live in an age of artistic appropriation. Recording artists freely "sample" music created by other people, visual artists stretch the concept of "fair use" to create art from photographs they did not take, and a young novelist in Germany was unconcerned when pages of someone else's writing were found in her own novel. "There is no such thing as originality," she said, "just authenticity. " By those standards, what the British theater group Kneehigh has done to David Lean's classic romantic melodrama "Brief Encounter" is mild indeed.

The first months of the year are, by consensus, the bleakest of cinematic times. But not so much if, like me, you are a lover of documentaries, someone who revels in the pleasures of the nonfiction film. Proofs of the remarkable strength of documentaries in this day and age are manifold right around now. If you were fortunate enough to go to last month's Sundance, for instance, a prime nonfiction showcase that this year screened some 40 documentaries from around the world, you got a peek at the best of what 2014 will offer.

Does James Franco ever sleep? In the past year, he's starred in such diverse films as "Oz the Great and Powerful," "Spring Breakers" and "This Is the End"; directed art house efforts like "Sal" and "Interior. Leather Bar. "; mentored Gia Coppola in adapting his book "Palo Alto Stories" into a film; been roasted on Comedy Central; mounted an unusual Oscar campaign; and even parodied a Kanye West video for good measure. Now a new trailer has been released for his directorial effort "Child of God," adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy.

A week after "12 Years a Slave" director Steve McQueen reportedly was ridiculed as an "embarrassing doorman" at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, critic Armond White has been shown the door himself. The critics group voted Monday morning to expel White from its ranks, member Owen Gleiberman confirmed in an online post. White, the editor and movie critic of City Arts, has denied reports that he heckled McQueen while the British filmmaker was accepting a directing award last week, but Gleiberman wrote : " I was sitting about 40 feet away from him, and though I couldn't make out everything that was said, I can testify: Everyone at my table lurched around to see where the loud, jeering, disruptive comments were coming from.

February 1, 2009 | Peter Terzian, Terzian is the editor of "Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums that Changed Their Lives," forthcoming in July.

"One thing about that lad," David Thomson's grandmother once announced, "you can always take him to see a picture. Then he's happy for a couple of hours." The young Thomson, who discovered cinema at the movie palaces of Streatham, a middle-class suburb that he describes as "a bit of London's infinity," grew up to be a film critic. He's perhaps best known for "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film," an unusual reference book that's both factually comprehensive and unapologetically opinionated.

Who remembers the great names of the city room? In a single generation, someone said, paraphrasing Kipling, they are one with Nineveh and Tyre, covered over with dust and forgotten. Which is one reason why it was so satisfying to see the sizable obituaries for film critic Judith Crist, who died Tuesday at age 90. Though regularly passed over in the deserved attention paid to the twin towers of Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, Crist was a force to be reckoned with in her prime, writing successively for the New York Herald Tribune, New York Magazine and TV Guide and appearing regularly on "The Today Show.

Richard Lester changed the cinematic language of the movie musical with his off-the-wall comic sensibilities and frenetic visual style in the Beatles' 1964's "A Hard Day's Night" and 1965's "Help!" even winning an MTV Music Award two decades later honoring him as the "father of music videos. " His swinging 1965 comedy "The Knack ... and How to Get It," with Michael Crawford, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Lester also managed to avoid being typecast as a comedic director, showing a more sensitive dramatic side in the quirky 1968 romance "Petulia" with Julie Christie and George C. Scott.

The authors and screenwriters of "Captain Phillips," "Philomena," "The Spectacular Now," "12 Years a Slave" and "What Maisie Knew" have been nominated for the 26th USC Libraries Scripter Award. Unlike other feature film awards, the Scripter Award honors both the screenwriter or screenwriters of an adaptation, as well as the author on which the screenplay is based. The nominees announced Thursday morning are: "Captain Phillips": Billy Ray, screenwriter; Richard Phillips with Stephan Talty, authors of "A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea. " GOLDEN GLOBES 2014: Play-at-home ballot "Philomena": Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, screenwriters; Martin Sixsmith, author of "The Lost Child of Philomena Lee. " "The Spectacular Now": Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, screenwriters; Tim Tharp, author of the novel of the same name.